Mexico Yaqui remains
returned from New York museum for burial
By Mark Stevenson, Mexico City, Mexico

Northern Mexico’s Yaqui buried their lost warriors after a two-year effort to
rescue the remains from New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where the
victims of one of North America’s last Indian massacres lay in
storage for more than a century.

The burial on November 16 capped an unprecedented joint effort by U.S. and
Mexican tribes to press both governments to bring justice and closure to a 1902
massacre by Mexican federal troops that killed about 150 Yaqui men, women and
children.

They would not be at peace with their souls and conscience until they got their
people back to their land,” said Jose Antonio Pompa of Mexico’s National
Institute of Anthropology and History.

The 12 skulls and other blood-spattered remains interred in Vicam, a traditional
Yaqui town in western Sonora state, carried some of the first forensic evidence
of Mexico’s brutal campaign to eliminate the tribe.

As if the horror of the massacre weren’t enough, U.S. anthropologist Ales
Hrdlicka came upon some of the bodies while they were still decaying, hacked off
the heads with a machete and boiled them to remove the flesh for his study of
Mexico’s “races.”

He sent the resulting collection to the New York museum. On Nov. 16, on the
slope of a mountain near the Yaqui village of Vicam, the 12 sets of remains were
“baptized” to give them names that have been lost to history.

They were given a warriors’ honor guard, and amid drumming, chants and
traditional “deer” and “coyote” dances, each was laid to rest in the ground they
had been striving to return to when they were slaughtered.

Perhaps best known for the mystical and visionary powers ascribed to them by
writer Carlos Castaneda, the Yaquis fought off repeated attempts by the Mexican
government to eliminate the tribe.

But they were largely defeated by 1900, and dictator Porfirio Diaz began moving
them off their fertile farmland to less valuable territory or to virtual
enslavement on haciendas as far away as eastern Yucatan state.

In 1902, about 300 men, women and children escaped from forced exile and started
walking back to their lands in Sonora. They were stopped in the mountains near
the capital of Hermosillo by 600 heavily armed soldiers, who
attacked them from behind. What ensued, long known as “the Battle of the Sierra
Mazatan,” is now considered one of the last large-scale Indian massacres in
North America.

What soldiers were doing was – instead of wasting ammunition – turning the rifle
around and hitting people in the head who were down, to make sure they were
dead,” said anthropologist Ventura Perez, who did a trauma investigation on the
skulls for the American Yaqui tribes.

Some bore execution-style gunshot wounds to the back of the head. Cut marks on
the bones indicated troops took ears as trophies, said Perez, a professor at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The bones were forgotten in museum storage until Perez and anthropologist Andrew
Darling, who works for the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, started to
study them in 2007 and realized their gruesome story.

The Pascua Yaqui tribe of Arizona took up the fight to have the bones returned.

The approach we use is that we are one people ... the border is just an
artificial concept,” said Robert Valencia, vice chairman of the Pascua Yaquis.

U.S. Indian remains are protected under the North American Indian Graves
Protection Act. But because the law doesn’t cover Mexican remains held in the
U.S., the Arizona tribe contacted the Mexican Yaquis and they in turn contacted
the Mexican government, which also decided to get involved.

The museum agreed the bones and other artifacts – including blood-spattered
blankets and a baby carrying-board from which Hrdlicka dumped an infant’s corpse
– should go back, saying “cultural sensitivities and values within the museum
community have changed” since Hrdlicka’s era.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History decided the real owners
were the Yaquis and handed over the remains and artifacts last month for burial.
The tribe held a memorial ceremony in a wood-paneled hall at the New York museum
on Central Park with incense, drums and chants.

“This is the first time that the (natural history museum) has turned over
cultural patrimony to a foreign government that immediately returned it to the
indigenous people,” the museum said in a statement.

The remains were honored by Yaqui on both sides of the border, spurring the
tribes’ hopes for recognition of their status as a single people who have long
lived in both countries – in Sonora and in southern Arizona near Tucson.

The remains were packed into ceremonial wooden boxes and taken first to Tucson,
where they were given a hero’s welcome by Pascua Yaquis, including an honor
guard of Indian veterans of the U.S. Army.

That is why the warriors’ role is important, because when we make territorial
claims, it is because Yaqui blood was spilled there,” said Mexican Yaqui elder
Ernesto Arguelles, 59. “This is the first opportunity we have had to stop and
mourn.”